הרב חזקיה בן רבי חייא

Chizkiyah ben Rabbi Chiyya lived in the passage between the tannaim and the amoraim, and is counted among the amoraim of Eretz Yisrael of the second generation. He was the son of Rabbi Chiyya and his wife Yehudit, and the twin of Yehuda b’rei d’Rabbi Chiyya. He is the plain “Chizkiyah” that appears in Shas in many places; both Rashi and Tosafot hold that he is to be reckoned a tanna. His colleagues included Bar Kappara, Rav Kahana, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, and Rabbi Yannai, who was the elder of the two. English sources give his name as Hezekiah ben Hiyya.

His beit midrash stood in Teveria, and his foremost talmid was Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha; so long as Chizkiyah was alive, Rabbi Yochanan was not appointed to head the yeshiva, out of the honor owed to his rebbe. It is told of him that in Teveria he read the Megillah both on the fourteenth of Adar and on the fifteenth, because he was in doubt whether the city counted as walled from the days of Yehoshua bin Nun — whether a city guarded on all four sides is what the halacha means, so that a city with the Kinneret at its edge is walled, or whether the measure is that the city be closed off on every side and cannot be spied out from without.